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TOMORROW is supposed to be World Press Freedom Day.
As media workers and their audiences and sources try to mark the day, in the apartheid state of Israel alone, there are more than 40 radio stations spewing Nazi-like hatred against Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority. In South Africa, despite the end of official apartheid in 1994, at least one radio station, Radio Pretoria, still preaches apartheid and allows white racists to celebrate the HIV/Aids pandemic as apartheid man�s answer to what Winston Churchill defined on February 28 1906 as "this black peril", meaning the fact that dark people outnumber whites by huge margins. In the United States, it is often impossible to distinguish between hatred coming from the unregistered pirate stations and the hatred and war-mongering coming from officially sanctioned channels. Fox Television and the New York Times engage in war-mongering against the people of Iraq, with the New York Times specifically calling for the bombing of Iraqi media so that they could be replaced with channels sponsored and controlled by the white invaders. The Voice of America, paid for by the US State Department, is responsible for its channel, Studio 7, which seeks to foment tribal and ethnic hatred in Zimbabwe. The British also have at least two hate channels seeking to incite hatred and divisions among Zimbabweans. ZW News wished for and predicted genocide in Zimbabwe, which was supposed to occur by January 2003. SW Radio is the other channel also seeking to foment divisions and precipitate civil war among Zimbabweans. In fact, any serious review of media freedom in the post-World Information and Communications Order (NWICO) era cannot ignore the fact that the hate speech and war-mongering which NWICO specifically sought to discourage and regulate have now taken centre stage in international relations. The following table gives only a glimpse of the full picture: Hate Channel/Station Country Hate Target/Victim Current Status RTLM Rwanda Tutsi and Hutu Allies Now Closed Radio Vryheid South Africa Africans Now Closed Radio Donkerhoek South Africa Africans Now Closed Radio Koppies South Africa Africans Now Closed Radio Volkstern South Africa Africans Now Closed Radio Pretoria South Africa Africans Still on Air Arutz 7 Israel Palestinians/Arabs Expanding WABC US (New York) All non-Europeans in US Still on Air SW Radio UK Zimbabweans Still on Air Studio 7 (Voice of America) US-Botswana Zimbabweans Still on Air ZW News UK Zimbabweans Operating To the partial list presented here, readers should add the dozens of US hate stations broadcasting into Cuba and against the people of Cuba; the several stations set up by the current occupation forces in Iraq for the purpose of dividing Kurds from Arabs; Shi�ites from Sunis; and religious Iraqis from the non-religious. But perhaps one development which our blind followers of the neo-liberal doctrine about media freedom always overlook is the evolution of the "embedded journalist" and the context in which that evolution has been perfected. The principles, which became known as the New World Information Order (NWICO), were adopted by the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers in 1974. In 1978, the Unesco General Assembly meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, adopted the Declaration of Fundamental Principles Concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War. This meant that the majority peoples of the world, through their Unesco delegates, voted to adopt an international code for regulating the professional conduct of national and transnational mass media services in the interest of peace and international understanding. The document was adopted by acclamation. In direct opposition to the NAM principles adopted at Algiers and the 1978 Unesco Declaration adopted at Belgrade, the United States and the United Kingdom launched a counter-offensive: l They experimented in ways to mobilise journalists and mass media services both to incite war and to assist in generating pro-paganda in support of war efforts, once hostilities started. The Falklands (Malvinas) war (1982) was used for this purpose by the British, while the US invasion of Grenada (1983) and the destabilisation of Nicaragua were used to overcome what the North Americans called "the Vietnam Syndrome". The leaders of the US were not happy with the ways in which US media covered the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. So, new wars had to be used to reverse the impact of Vietnam. l They decided that the Senegalese Director-General of Unesco would have to be replaced by a white person as soon as possible. l They launched a multi-pronged media campaign to denigrate and demonise NAM, Unesco and those African governments and liberation movements supporting NWICO. l They quit Unesco and imposed sanctions on the agency, until and unless it dropped NWICO and the 1978 Unesco Declaration. By the time of the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1989, the imperial powers felt so encouraged in their anti-NWICO campaign that they made their doctrine of "free-flow of information" part and parcel of the economic Structural Adjustment package to be enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the model of "the embedded journalist" was reaching perfection, having been tested again in the Gulf War of 1991. The Nato powers bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 redefined journalism so that all channels and journalists opposing the Nato war no longer deserved protection. At least 20 journalists were, therefore, bombed to death in their places of work in Yugoslavia. A similar number have been murdered in the current war against Iraq. In addition, the use of mass communication technology as a direct war weapon was also being perfected. It involved jamming national radio and television channels in the invaded country and replacing their broadcasts with the invaders� own broadcasts. The US Air Force (in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Grenada) used the EC-130 Commando Solo technology to first jam and then take over the radio and television frequencies of national broadcasting channels. These were then used to carry the invaders� own programmes against the population of the invaded country. In the Nato war against Yugoslavia, this diabolic technology and method was used more than 400 times. Mass communication technologies, whose salesmen claim that they bring the world together, were used to do the opposite in the invasion of Iraq. The US and UK used robots with cameras as spies to capture images of the war continually and in places too dangerous for their soldiers. The murder of whole cities and towns from afar was captured close-up on video. The pictures from these robots celebrate genocide as "Shock and Awe". They are also used by manufacturers of the weapons employed in order to market more weapons. The pictures also serve to intimidate countries and peoples targeted or hated by the same invading powers. The message is: "Change your national policies and governments or we will do the same to you." In Venezuela in December 2002, foreign-funded coup plotters used similar technology to switch off the national broadcaster, leaving only four "independent" corporate stations to broadcast the coup plotters� lies. They told Venezuelans that popular President Hugo Chavez had voluntarily given up power and that the coup plotters had formed a new government. The president had, in fact, been captured and detained on a Pacific island. However, President Chavez managed to send a message to the popular movement that first brought him to power, telling the people that he was alive; he had not resigned; and he would fight to the end. The people then mobilised against the coup plotters. They moved on to the streets and managed to switch the national broadcaster back on air. In fact, President Chavez has survived two coups d�etat. In 2003, he spoke to the UN General Assembly at length about the growth of evil media systems used to destroy popular movements and their governments. He said: "I bought a book by Ignacio Ramonet, a prestigious intellectual who has studied these (media) issues for many years. And he reminded me of one of his books: The Media Dictatorship, which is about how the mass media � and Venezuela is a case in point � most of the time don�t care about either laws or constitutions (when such stand in their way); they want to put themselves above the rights of the people, either to install a president (of their choice) or to get rid of a president (they don�t like), to make economic profits. They are what is called the fifth estate . . . In Venezuela we have unmasked them because we believe that this effort makes a small contribution to the struggle for the dignity of the world�s people who are so often trampled upon by media dictatorships of big corporations that have a lot of money but no legitimacy whatsoever because nobody elected them, (media) who show absolutely no respect for the law of our countries and absolutely no respect for the dignity of our peoples." This is the story and analysis which our neo-liberal media evangelists in Zimbabwe do not dare tell. For example, The Financial Gazette of last Thursday, April 29 2004, recycled the same feature they have done over the past three years. The feature avoided critical media policy issues by merely begging the question: "Does Zimbabwe have the Press it deserves?" Before an honest answer could even be attempted, the authors of the story had already foreclosed it by deciding that Mr Stanford Moyo, Dr Lovemore Madhuku and Dr John Makumbe were not just "experts" but, in fact, the media experts in Zimbabwe. So the feature was pretty much restricted to their slogans about media freedom and freedom of _expression_, slogans not only borrowed from neo-liberal Britain and America of the anti-NWICO league, but slogans which demonstrate that these people are neither media experts nor the media experts to speak for "Zimbabweans". They seem to be ignorant of the fact that the biggest threats to media freedom and diversity are the corporate processes of concentration, conglomeration and hyper-commercialism. They cite no research. They refer to no concrete historical experience of real societies in real countries. They ignore the historical experience of Zimbabwe at the hands of mass media. The one thing they have in common is not media expertise but neo- liberal opposition to African liberation movements and the governments based on such movements and such a legacy. When it comes to the mass media today, there is absolutely no need to lie or to shout empty slogans. The evidence of the world�s experience is so plentiful and so clear as to be staggering. The borrowed ideals and slogans still being peddled in Zimbabwe today do not only confuse freedom of human _expression_ with the power of corporate monopolies to engage in broadcasting and publishing; they also serve to hide the fact that the so-called First Amendment to the US Constitution (in 1791) did not have the global application it is allowed today. The US in 1791 was a rural nation of slave-owning racists who did not regard Africans as human beings. The concept of freedom in 1791 totally excluded Africans and all women. But that is not all. The bombing of New York and the Pentagon on September 11 2001 forced the same champions of the doctrine of "free-flow of information" to abandon it entirely. The recent admission that journalists covering the US-UK occupation of Iraq have to be "embedded" by the war machine is the latest indication of the abandonment of the doctrine of "free-flow of information" and freedom of _expression_ as belonging to broadcasting and publishing business. The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
